President Donald Trump on Wednesday relayed information that planned executions of protestors in Iran are expected to be canceled.
“We’ve been told that the killing in Iran is stopping,” Trump said at a press conference. “It’s stopping, and there’s no plan for executions or an execution.”
Hundreds of people have already been killed in the rising protests against the Islamic revolutionary state, with the actual death toll disputed, and many are calling for the end of the regime.
Asked to clarify the source of the comment, which implies that discussions on the situation are ongoing between the administration and Tehran, Trump referenced conversations with “some very important people on the other side,” but didn’t elaborate further.
“They’ve said the killing has stopped and the executions won’t take place. There was supposed to be a lot of executions today, and that the executions won’t take place,” Trump said.
However, he indicated that there was still some doubt about whether the Iranian regime would follow through.
“We’re going to find out … but we’ve been told on good authority, and I hope it’s true,” Trump said. “Who knows? … But they told me that there’ll be no executions, and so I hope that’s true.”
After days of flirting with military intervention to assist the people of Iran against their government, Trump suggested that any U.S. action could be terminated if the regime keeps its promise.
He was asked by a reporter if the update means that the United States is taking military action “off the table.”
Trump said that the U.S. would “watch and see what the process is.”
Earlier Wednesday, Iranian judiciary leader Gholamhossein Mohseni-Ejei called for the government to quickly retaliate against more than 18,000 people for participating in the protests, suggesting that they should be tried and executed rapidly.
“If we want to do a job, we should do it now. If we want to do something, we have to do it quickly,” Mohseni-Ejei said. “If it becomes late, two months, three months later, it doesn’t have the same effect.”
Other Iranian officials have accused the United States and Israel of provoking and inciting the protests.
Mohammad Pakpour, commander of Iran’s paramilitary Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps, reiterated these claims on Wednesday, telling Iran’s semiofficial Tasnim news agency that the United States and Israel will “receive the response in the appropriate time.”
However, the protestors themselves cite different reasons for their demonstrations. International observers have attributed the unrest primarily to economic conditions in Iran as U.S. and Western sanctions continue to affect the nation’s economy.
The death toll from the recent unrest in Iran and crackdown by the state has reached at least 2,586 people, according to the U.S.-based Human Rights Activists News Agency, and the actual number is feared to be much higher.
Of those, 2,417 are protestors and 147 are affiliated with the state, the organization said.
That makes the current round of protests the most deadly that have occurred since the deposition of the U.S.-backed Persian monarch in 1979 by the Iranian Revolution.
It comes months after the United States carried out strikes within Iran targeting the nation’s underground nuclear facilities.
The Associated Press contributed to this report.
